Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 M3 Plays With Windows 8.1 & More

The latest development snapshot of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 is now available with the official release just being a week or two away.

Less than one month after the last development release, Phoronix Test Suite 5.0-Plavsk Milestone 3 was tagged and uploaded on Monday night. Improvements to be found in this latest version of our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software includes:

- A few Microsoft Windows 8.1 support improvements. Thanks to Nicholas Omann for the Windows improvements. The Phoronix Test Suite already has offered limited support for Windows 7/8/8.1 on x64 hardware (those interested can see our many Windows 8 test articles). The Phoronix Test Suite itself works just fine and several test profiles are ported (particularly the graphics tests) while additional tests can be ported to Windows either via the community or commercial engineering engagements.

- A new SKIP_TESTING_SUBSYSTEMS environment variable for skipping certain tests belonging to a given hardware subsystem when evaluating a test run queue.

- A new run-random-tests command. This command, with some quick, limited input from the user at start-time will end up running random tests/benchmarks on the system. This command can be used for stressing a system / burning it in, simply running random workloads to check the system's stability, or for just running a lot of benchmarks of your system and uploading them to OpenBenchmarking.org for showing off your system's performance.

- Phodevi has improvements for detecting the NVIDIA DDX/X.Org driver version in some newer cases, improved audio hardware detection, and improvements for reading the Radeon DRM's reported core/memory frequencies on the Linux 3.14 kernel with DPM enabled.

Overall, Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 is shaping up to be a great release with many changes not just to the GUI but for expanded enterprise testing, improved multi-OS (non-Linux) support, new hardware/software detection improvements, more polishing, and other changes.

This latest release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 can be downloaded from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Depending upon feedback and any last minute changes, the official release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 will likely come in the next week or two. Your contributions and feedback are much appreciated; those wishing to play with the latest code can find it on GitHub. As always, commercial support is also available.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.